I put the papers and photos carefully back into the envelope and lay them to one side.
“Thank you,” I say, reaching for my cup. “For all of this.”
He lifts his eyebrows. “Viv was one hell of a girl,” he says.
I hesitate to ask my next question, not wanting to be insensitive. “Do you know much about what happened between her and Santo?”
He casts his eyes to the ceiling and laughs softly. “We were all a little bit in love with your mother back then, but we were chopped liver as soon as she laid her baby blues on my brother.” He shakes his head. “He came by for a few beers before a gig one night and that was that. For the next two days they were love’s young dream. I hardly recognized Santo, he was so entranced by your mother.”
He speaks slow and low, remembering in his own time.
“And then it was time for us to hit the road. Gigs lined up across the country, heading toward L.A. and the big time, if Louis was to be believed. In truth, I wasn’t so sure she was going to go. Thought she’d pick my brother over us.”
“But she didn’t,” I say, because this is the one part of the story I know.
“It was touch and go,” Felipe says. “The bus waited five minutes, then ten, before she came running around the corner and got in, tear ducts overflowing just like yours are now.” He waves his hand toward my face. “Didn’t speak to a soul the whole way, she just slunk to the back of the bus like a wounded animal.”
We sit in contemplative silence, punctuated by my tearful sniffs. I’m so incredibly saddened to think of my mother caught between love and ambition, far too young and fragile to make such life-changing decisions. Yet she didn’t hesitate for a moment when she found out she was pregnant, Felipe said. She always told me that the day she discovered she was expecting was the happiest of her life, because she’d finally have someone to love forever. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, especially now I have all this new knowledge of how much she gave up to be a mother. She must have gone out on to that stage full of swirling emotions. Perhaps that’s why the photograph seems to capture so much of who she was—she was literally caught between her old life and her new one.
“You said you had something else to show me?”
Felipe scrubs his hand over his bristled cheek and then gets up and crosses to the television. I watch him, perplexed, until I notice the VHS slot beneath the screen.
“Felipe…” I say, my hand over the base of my throat. “Is there film?”
He turns back to look at me. “You sure you want to do this?”
I’m breathless, my eyes nailed to the screen, unable to believe I might be about to see my mother.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“It’s our highlights reel.” Felipe leans back and squints to read the buttons on the machine. “Brought back some memories for me watching this yesterday, let me tell you.”
“Highlight reel,” I murmur, as if he’s speaking a completely different language. My heart is banging so hard I might not be able to hear the film.
“That’s got it,” he says, sitting back down as the screen flickers. “Give it a minute.”
I’m so nervous that my palms are sweating, terrified that the old player is going to chew the tape.
“Why is it taking so long?” I mutter, looking between Felipe and the screen.
“Just wait…” He bats his hand toward me. “It’s an old machine, takes a bit of time to get going.”
I grip the edge of the sofa when the screen fills with a still of the band’s logo and one of their tracks crackles from the speakers.
“Bit dusty,” Felipe says, but I don’t care, because the logo disappears and the band bursts onto the screen, a recording of a live performance to a packed, sweaty crowd. It’s a bit dark and the sound isn’t perfect, but it’s my living and breathing mother as I’ve never seen her before and I’m entranced. I watched her perform countless times across my life, but this…this is electric. She’s so young but so damn powerful, holding every single person in that club in the palm of her hand.
“She was a proper superstar, wasn’t she?” I whisper, swiping fat tears from my lashes so I can see.
“Dynamite,” Felipe says.
The performance ends and the film fades to black, then fades back in again to a Q and A with the band. They’re answering banal questions in the main, but it doesn’t matter to me because she’s chatting and laughing. Her voice is lost music to my ears, her laughter a bell calling me closer to the TV. I’m off the sofa now and kneeling in front of the screen, and I reach out to touch her face when she looks down the camera and laughs. It’s as if she’s looking directly at me, and I laugh and cry with sheer wonder because it feels as if she’s fleetingly here, as if by some miracle we can see each other for just this brief, tiny moment of connection.
“Mum,” I murmur, my mouth full of salty tears. I’m not just crying, I’m sobbing, hot therapeutic tears, my body shaking because the last few days have been so horrific and it feels as if she’s found a way to reach out and tell me I’m going to be okay. “I miss you so much,” I whisper, still touching the screen as it fades and credits roll.
Felipe puts his hand on my shoulder, and when I get to my feet he holds his arms out for me to stumble into.
“It’s okay, kiddo,” he says, patting my back. “It’s okay. I got ya.”
He steers me back to the sofa and passes me more tissues, patting my knee while I pull myself together.
“Sorry,” I gulp. “That was a real shock.”
“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” he says. “I know how wonderful she was.”
I hear emotion thicken his voice and try to raise a watery smile for his benefit, because he didn’t have to do this and I don’t have words special enough to express what it means to me. I didn’t really know what to expect when I came here this morning. Not this. Not to feel as if my mother has reached through the ether between worlds to hold my hand and remind me exactly whose daughter I am.
“Can we watch it again?”
Felipe presses rewind, and we sit alongside each other and watch it twice more, then he ejects it and hands it to me.
“Keep it. I was there, it’s all in here.” He taps the side of his head as he buttons his coat. “Sometimes it’s the letting go of things that sets you free, Iris.”
I clutch the warm chunk of plastic as if it’s precious metal. This tape, the poster taken on the day my mother discovered she was pregnant…they’re gold dust for me. How strange that they’ve sat forgotten in this lock-up all these years, as if they were waiting for the exact moment to reveal themselves when I needed them most of all. I’m not a superstitious person as a rule—I’ll walk under ladders and much prefer grumpy orange cats to lucky black ones—but there’s an undeniable feeling of cosmic interference here, as if Felipe’s crackly old TV set was a temporary conduit between realms. I finish my coffee and realize I’m finally warm for the first time in days. I put my hand on my left thigh and it isn’t shaking anymore.